Hong Kong Resident Pays $664,000 for Parking Space

Extreme real estate conditions in Hong Kong have lead to the sale of a private parking spot for $664,000. The parking spot, located in Upton, a residential high-rise, is 188 square feet, reports South China Morning Post, scmp.com. The buyer is a man named Kwan Wai-ming, who works as executive director of Huarong Investment stock Corp. This is Kan Wai-ming’s third parking spot in the building.

Lots of comparisons have been made as to what other kinds of property can be bought for that price: 1-bedroom apartments in New York; three-bedroom condos in Chicago, and so on. Other, more worthwhile, analysis examines how the buyer justifies this extravagance. Still other commentary addresses how real estate trends will affect people in the future. Prices for apartments in the building go for $40 to $70 million, reports architecturaldigest.com.

The soaring of property values has left many government officials concerned for the younger residents of Hong Kong, and if they will be able to afford living in their native land.

Those of us with regular amounts of money can’t imagine spending that amount on parking because 1. we don’t have the cash; and 2. not having cash makes that kind of expenditure seem outrageous, maybe even immoral, and wasteful. I can’t answer for anyone else, but I know that if I had billions to spend, $664,000 wouldn’t seem like a big deal. But I hope I’d still see it the way I do now: you can feed a lot of people with $664,000. I’m happy to be a guinea pig in research on the attitudes of the ultra-wealthy, however, if anybody feels like investing in a test of my self-righteousness.